Film / Video Art
My film and video art practice explores memory, home, sexuality, and cultural narrative through non-fiction. I work primarily with Super 8mm film, which I shoot and process myself, alongside found footage and family archives—Super 8mm, VHS, and 16mm—along with DSLR and 35mm photography. Sound design is central, adding emotional depth and enhancing the viewer's experience. My work blends personal memory with broader cosmological themes, drawing on Indigenous knowledge and Ojibwe creation stories to imagine non-human beings. These films are primarily created for art exhibitions and projection spaces outside traditional theater or festival settings.
Aki is Earth. Using materials and metaphors and symbolism to explore Ojibwe stories of creation, Aki is conceptual and links the past into the future. To move beyond what we can see, the film uses photomicrography – a DSLR camera mounted onto a microscope – for footage of seeds, biological cells, and blood with a soundscape generated by animal life acoustics, lake water, wild onions, pine, and other cultural elements that become conductors of sounds through electricity and heat – creating an unusual insight into our creation and an ongoing relationship to EARTH on a microscopic and macro scale.
Commissioned – We The Peoples Before, at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Washington D.C
Aki
Blood Memory is a poetic exploration of identity and memory, composed of dream-like images from my father’s Super 8mm home movies. The sound was created by recording my thoughts as I engaged with the footage, shaped by affect and personal memory.
Commissioned as a dialogue with the concept of Blood Memory—as explored by Indigenous writers Gerald Vizenor and N. Scott Momaday—the piece reflects on the intertwining of personal and ancestral memories. Vizenor’s notion that “words are in the blood” and Momaday’s exploration of blood memory’s connection to tribal history inform the work, prompting reflection on how generational legacies shape our sense of self.
Made with S - 8 mm film.
Blood Memory
Eight years after creating Blood Memory, the artist presents Blood (and) Memory2, a continuation of the exploration of ancestral and personal memory. The title honors Chadwick Allen’s 1999 essay Blood (and) Memory, which builds on the concepts introduced by N. Scott Momaday and Gerald Vizenor. While Momaday connects blood memory to tribal history and Vizenor emphasizes that “words are in the blood,” Allen’s essay deepens the discussion by exploring memory as a living, generative force.
Blood (and) Memory2 is a split-screen video made from home movies recorded on VHS tape. It features four layers of sonic composition: digitally remixed voice narration over the original VHS audio, with a base layer of found “flute beat box.” The work explores how memory is passed down, remixed, and reinterpreted across generations, creating an ongoing dialogue between self, culture, and history.
Made with VHS tape.
Commissioned – Created for premier at the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, NYC, NY
Blood (and) Memory 2
Because of Who I Am is an artistic exploration of identity, gender, and memory. Part artist profile, part documentary, and part creative exploration, the film uses the family photo album as a catalyst to inspire stories and reflections on often unheard or unasked histories. It reveals the complex intersections of colonialism and gender, challenging pan-American gender roles by reclaiming Indigenous narratives and examining how colonial histories have shaped gender expression. Through this process, the film invites a deeper understanding of the past and present, offering insights into ourselves and others while disrupting normative assumptions about gender, identity, and cultural survival.
Made with stop-motion photography.
Because of Who I Am
For This Life reflects on the liminal space between life and death, presence and absence. Commissioned during a poignant and bittersweet time in my life, the piece captures the quiet anxiety and sense of waiting that enveloped me as my grandmother began to part with her belongings, gifting her cherished blankets to family and friends and referencing time as “when I am gone.” In her actions, she seemed to be preparing to leave—both in the physical sense and in a more spiritual, emotional way.
The film engages with the complexities of memory, time, and love, using this personal moment as a lens through which to explore universal themes of loss, legacy, and the passage of time. For This Life is a meditation on the profound emotional weight of saying goodbye and the ways we hold on to what matters most as we face the inevitable.
Made with S-8 B&W film and color Kodachrome;
Commissioned – the Los Angeles Echo Park Film Center. Los Angeles, CA
For This Life
Screenings & Discussions
If you're interested in commissioning work or screening films as part of an event, festival, or discussion, please contact for booking details and availability.
This selection of films and videos highlights Marcella’s work. For a complete list of titles in her portfolio, please contact.
Fire is both a spiritual and practical force. This piece explores the significance of fire in California. For thousands of years, many Native American tribes have used fire to manage the land, each with their own deep understanding of how, why, and when to burn. In this context, fire represents a traditional land management system that, when practiced correctly, supported plant life and wildlife. Native peoples intentionally set manageable, controlled fires that not only promoted the growth of grasses for grazing but also reduced hazardous underbrush and fuel loads in forests. However, at the turn of the 20th century, the U.S. Forest Service began to view these “Indian-set fires” as destructive, leading to policies that suppressed controlled burning and banned fires set by indigenous peoples across the country.